The cost was too great for the features being added. After months of ordering more laptops and devices to test, I eventually pulled the plug on querying a new WDDM version to resolve the remaining driver compatibility issues.
When my team went into testing for the platform update, a significant number of hybrid laptop drivers and unsupported wrapper drivers for things like USB displays behaved erratically when a new driver version was queried. Exposing those hardware features requires the runtime query a new WDDM version and function table from the user mode drivers.
The actual truth is my team engineered the platform update to have full support for the hardware features in feature level 11.1. There was a lot of negative press about the 11.1 hardware features not being supported on Windows 7 in that platform update, along with a significant amount of speculation in the press that the hardware features were turned off to create a need to upgrade to Windows 8. A classic example of this is the Direct3D 11.1 API Platform Update for Windows 7, where my team brought the 11.1 API from Windows 8 back to Windows 7. If the goal is to describe which API methods function fully I could further throw another complicating factor by considering OS version and WDDM version. The pattern was established before I was the lead for Direct3D so I've favored continuity over aggressively renaming things just to make a mark.
There are a lot of formerly hidden steps in building Direct3D that are visible now and every partner in the industry, from game developer, to IHV, to Direct3D is figuring out how to work in this more open model.Īndrew Lauritzen and I are in complete agreement about the feature level and API numbering being confusing. It's natural for some amount of confusion to occur the first time this is attempted. I'm trying to be more open during the development process of Direct3D, pulling in feedback earlier in the development process to make a better API and enable developers to create content earlier. It's too dramatic a change to back port that bind model to 11.3 so such rendering features would be 12.0 specific. I'm sure several hardware vendors are already dreaming up ways to exploit that bind model for new rendering features. Consider the 12.0 bind model that I announced at IDF. Announcing new feature levels is something I prefer to do at the same time across all hardware vendors.Īs far as parity of new hardware features between Direct3D 11.3 and 12.0, generally my team is trying to bring hardware features to both however there may eventually be some features that only make sense on 12.0. At minimum this means capability bits but one could reasonably assume there's a common set across multiple hardware vendors that I'll eventually announce as a new feature level, once the issues of conformance & support are settled across hardware vendors. I also confirmed there are a couple more features beyond what was disclosed. What I did just confirm last week is the existence of four new rendering features that will be included in both the Direct3D 11.3 and Direct3D 12.0 APIs: ROVs, Typed UAVs, Volume Tiled Resources, and Conservative Rasterization. All statements concerning a feature level 11.3 or 12.0 is speculation, as are any statements about hardware supporting such feature levels. Microsoft hasn't confirmed the name/value of any new feature levels yet, nor have the final conformance tests been handed off to hardware vendors.